Cleveland State’s Healing Begins With an N.C.A.A. Bid

For 23 years, members of Cleveland State’s most famous basketball team had waited for this moment, for some team, any team, from their alma mater to return to the N.C.A.A. tournament.

As they watched the Vikings upset Butler on Tuesday in Indianapolis to clinch the program’s first bid since 1986, they thought back to that season, to their magical tournament run and the subsequent unraveling of their program.

“We were a shining star in the darkness of Cleveland sports,” Clinton Ransey, a forward on the 1986 team, said this week. “And all that came crashing down in an instant.”

After time-capsule tournament upsets of Indiana and St. Joseph’s put Cleveland State in the Round of 16, the program fell into two decades of disarray.

Paul Stewart, a promising forward, died on the court less than two months after the tournament. Reports published soon afterward said the team’s leading scorer, Clinton Smith, had played the 1985-86 season while on probation for a felony conviction.

Recruiting violations put the university on N.C.A.A. probation starting in 1987, and the coach, Kevin Mackey, was fired in 1990 after the police arrested him as he drove away from a crack house. In 2006, the leading scorer in the team’s history, Ken McFadden, sued Cleveland State for racial discrimination during his post-basketball employment.

“It had an innocence at the beginning, when we were building the thing and there wasn’t any interest,” Mackey said. “Once you get the spectacular wins and the results, everything changes.”

They arrived as unknown gems, hungry and tough, transfers from storied programs like Ohio State and off-the-radar ones like the North Dakota School of Science.

McFadden, the point guard known as Mouse, came from New York City, never played high school basketball and painted houses in Cleveland while completing his G.E.D.

Smith pleaded guilty in 1985 to five counts of forgery for cashing university checks, according to The News-Herald of Northern Ohio. On the court, he was the Vikings’ top player, a defender who guarded four different positions.

Stewart sang like Luther Vandross, and teammates teased him about his missing neck. Eddie Bryant, known as Fast Eddie, was the team’s tough guy. Ransey struggled in jumping over a Sunday newspaper, teammates said, but he was a fundamentally sound player. And Eric Mudd, a center nicknamed the Gigolo, had a wardrobe full of suits.

“That team was unbelievable,” McFadden said. “Not only were we extremely deep, but we were extremely talented. Quickness. Size. Speed. We had athletes. We had comedians. We had dancers. Singers. Entertainers. You name it, it was all wrapped up in one team.”

Mackey ran the Vikings, and ran them literally. An Irish-Catholic with a thick Boston accent, he called his system the Stun ’N Gun, 94 feet of havoc and chaos and pressure, so many players rotating in and out that even his stars averaged less than 27 minutes.

The Vikings received the final at-large N.C.A.A. tournament bid in 1986, a year after a 21-victory season had failed to get them into the National Invitation Tournament. Mackey had told his players they were going to have to kick the door down, and kick it they did, even routing DePaul in Chicago.

“As soon as we saw Indiana, we said: ‘Who’s next? Because they’re beaten,’ ” McFadden said. “We were that confident about it.”

To Cleveland State, Indiana represented the perfect draw. The Hoosiers played with a slower, plodding style, and had only days to study the Vikings’ chaos theory.

Photo

Cedric Jackson helped Cleveland State reach the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1985-86.Credit
Joe Traver/The New York Times

The night before the game, the team gathered in the room of Steve Corbin, nicknamed the Identified Flying Object, and each player told his teammates what victory would mean.

The next day, they slowed the Indiana star Steve Alford and won, 83-79. Next came a victory over St. Joseph’s, and when the Vikings returned to Cleveland on March 17, thousands of fans mobbed them at the airport.

If Mackey could change one thing about that tournament, he would never have returned to Cleveland. The publicity was too high, the demands too great. When his team came out flat against Navy in the Round of 16, Mackey knew why.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Navy’s David Robinson ended their magical season with a buzzer beater. McFadden said that loss still haunts him.

From those dizzying heights came a fall of equal proportions. Forward Pat Vuyancih still remembers seeing the ambulance in front of the college gym, next to Stewart, whom he described as the team’s heart and soul, stretched out on a gurney, dead from a heart attack.

That shock stuck with the Vikings during the next season. Smith had graduated. Mudd broke his wrist. The team still finished 25-8, but it lost in the second round of the N.I.T.

In December 1987, the N.C.A.A. hit Cleveland State with three years of probation and a two-year ban on postseason play for violations in recruiting foreign players during the 1983-84 season.

The most shocking news came next, on July 13, 1990. Mackey said he had long been an alcoholic, and he started a cocaine habit after his team’s tournament run. Mackey said he thought he had control of the situation, “but obviously, I didn’t.”

Photo

Kevin Mackey led Cleveland State to the N.C.A.A. tournament in 1985-86. Credit
Darron Cummings/Associated Press

An anonymous caller told the police they could find Mackey in a crack house. The same caller also tipped off a local television station. Mackey had signed a contract with the university worth more than $300,000 earlier that week. He owned a 13-bedroom house and was married with three children.

Cameras and the police caught Mackey leaving the crack house with his mistress, stumbling and driving away on the wrong side of the road. Cleveland State fired him six days later.

His players said they learned from Mackey’s experience, from the way it humbled him, from the way he rebounded.

“Kevin’s scenario, that really deflated, that really took a lot of life out of the program,” McFadden said. “Because he was on top of the world. He did something that nobody was able to do, bringing a team from nowhere, from ‘The Mistake by the Lake,’ into the limelight. And then, boom.”

Mackey went to the rehabilitation center run by the former N.B.A. point guard John Lucas. He said he has been sober since. For 13 years, he traveled what he calls the alphabet-soup coaching circuit, with stints in minor leagues across the United States, and in Korea, Argentina and Canada — anywhere, he said, with a whistle and a paycheck.

Eventually, in 2004, Larry Bird called and offered him a scouting job with the Indiana Pacers. Mackey at first thought it was a prank, but he has worked for the team since 2004.

From the 1986 run, the university built the 13,000-seat Convocation Center and converted a Holiday Inn across the street into player housing.

At the 20-year reunion, the fans gave Mackey a rousing ovation of forgiveness, but the postseason drought hung like a cloud over the proceedings.

For Vuyancih, it lifted Tuesday, as he and two of his former teammates watched Cleveland State topple Butler on national television.

“It had a healing effect on our souls,” he said. “Those kids helped bring us back. We felt their heart and their intensity. It helped heal the stigma attached to everything that happened. We came full circle. Maybe some of the wounds that were still there, some of the old scars, have healed.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Cleveland State’s Healing Begins With a Bid. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe